Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by caitlinxmartin
Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow
5.0
The Collyer Brothers were hoarders who died in their Fifth Avenue house surrounded by their many possessions in 1947. The first body was discovered on March 21st, Homer, dead of malnutrition, dehydration and cardiac arrest. Langley wasn't found until April 8, crushed under a newspaper tunnel when one of his booby traps killed him. They were the sons of a prominent family who had withdrawn into their home as the affluent neighborhood of Harlem changed around them. After their deaths, the city removed 130 tons of garbage from their residence.
E.L. Doctorow has re-imagined the Collyer brothers in this new novel and has taken them up through the years into modern times, using the memories of Homer to tell the story of a century. Homer, blind and eventually death, and his relationship with his brother, Langley, gassed in World War I and irreparably damaged form the clear strong center of the novel.
It would be hard for me to say how much I loved this book. It is so beautiful, so delicate, so intrinsically sad without being overwrought. If Edward Hopper wrote a novel, he might write this one. Doctorow handles the brothers, their relationship, and their house brilliantly. Seen through Homer's eyes there is no illness, no hoarding, just some clutter representing the physical manifestation of his brother's Theory of Replacements. It would have been so easy to turn this into a sensationalized tabloid version of two dirty, crazy old guys, but Doctorow never once steps over the line into caricature in this heartbreaking and beautiful novel about the worlds we leave behind.
E.L. Doctorow has re-imagined the Collyer brothers in this new novel and has taken them up through the years into modern times, using the memories of Homer to tell the story of a century. Homer, blind and eventually death, and his relationship with his brother, Langley, gassed in World War I and irreparably damaged form the clear strong center of the novel.
It would be hard for me to say how much I loved this book. It is so beautiful, so delicate, so intrinsically sad without being overwrought. If Edward Hopper wrote a novel, he might write this one. Doctorow handles the brothers, their relationship, and their house brilliantly. Seen through Homer's eyes there is no illness, no hoarding, just some clutter representing the physical manifestation of his brother's Theory of Replacements. It would have been so easy to turn this into a sensationalized tabloid version of two dirty, crazy old guys, but Doctorow never once steps over the line into caricature in this heartbreaking and beautiful novel about the worlds we leave behind.